Garden update: One month

This year I decided to take pictures of our garden each month and write a brief update for my blog. My plan is to do the update on the 13th of each month, since I wrote my original garden post on May 13, 2015. So far I'm right on track. Here are the June pictures:

A view of the whole garden. Most of the herbs are coming up in the pots; the dill, in the reddish pot, is definitely in the lead.

There are several blossoms on the zucchini plants.

The cucumbers are growing slowly but surely. I know once they get going they'll be crazy, so I'm okay with the slow start. We've been giving them a little help by guiding them toward the trellis.

The kale (left) and lettuce are going strong. We've already harvested lettuce twice. We just pull off a few of the outside (bottom) leaves from each plant when we want some for salads or sandwiches. (You can tell we need to do some more weeding here. It's a really tricky area because it's kind of blocked in on all sides: the rhubarb on the right, trellis in front, bean towers on the left, and the garden fence in the back. We'll have to keep that in mind for next year.)

The beans are starting to vine up the towers. We only had about nine sprouts come up from the first planting, so a couple of weeks ago we planted more seeds, and now I think we have close to twenty.




The pepper plants are getting buds/flowers. We have one plant each of red, yellow, and green bell peppers. I also planted a red pepper seed pod that was starting to sprout. Unfortunately, I pulled the leaves when I was over-zealously weeding one day. Bummer. I'm not sure if that one will come back or not.

Here is the back of the garden (from left to right): pepper cages, poles for the peas, carrots, and watermelon. We are having no luck with the peas, and we've planted seeds twice. We might try one more time just for the heck of it. The carrots are starting to sprout (see photo below), but the watermelon hasn't gotten much bigger. We've had a lot of rain over the past month, which is great, but I think the watermelon would prefer the weather to be a little warmer and drier.

Here are the carrots. I'm glad they finally started coming up; every time I went out to pull weeds I was sure that I was probably pulling out the carrots. Now it's easier to tell what's weeds and what's baby carrots.



The three tomato plants have grown quite a bit -- two of them have blossoms -- but the eggplant is taking its time. We also had a garden surprise when two stalks of asparagus came up between the tomato cages. The first one didn't last very long, but the second one, which is really skinny, just kept growing until it was taller than the tomato cages and then it went to seed. It's the feathery-looking stalk on the left side of the photo.

We even have one tomato already growing! This is an Indigo Rose tomato plant.

The broccoli (top) and Brussels sprouts (bottom) are coming along, too. I'm especially amazed with the broccoli, because last year the rabbits feasted on our broccoli; as soon as a leaf appeared, it was gobbled up. But with the fence up this year, we haven't had any problems with the rabbits. We do have an adorable baby bunny who likes to hang out in our backyard, but he seems perfectly content eating grass and weeds, which is fine by me.

The strawberries are getting big, too, and we have one berry so far. These plants are an everbearing variety, rather than June-bearing, so we should get strawberries all summer rather than just one early crop. That is, of course, if we can get to the berries before the birds and squirrels.

This picture and the next one are from our flower bed by the alley. (You can see it in the picture above with the twisty poles and the watermelon.) This plant is milkweed, and there are actually several of them in the flower bed. It came up by itself after we pulled out the black plastic-y ground covering, and we weren't sure what it was at first. We had bought a few milkweed seedlings, but they haven't really flourished, so we were excited when we finally realized that's what this was.

The sunflowers are coming up, along with a number of other flowers -- we scattered lots of different flower seeds over the flower bed. The sunflowers are a mammoth variety, so they can grow up to 12 feet tall. I'm curious to see how tall ours will actually get.

When we look at the garden every day, it doesn't seem like it's changed much. But when you compare these photos to the ones in my first garden post, you can see there's an amazing difference. I wonder how much the garden will change during the next month. Thanks for stopping by!